Creating Third Spaces of Learning for Post-Capitalism: A Comparative Study

• In Event: Creating and Sustaining Fugitive, “Third Spaces” of Learning With/in/Against an Increasingly Authoritarian State

Abstract

This presentation draws on data from a comparative study of third spaces of learning drawing on Bhabha’s (1994), notion of third space and Gibson-Graham’s (2006) politics of post-capitalism. Third space is a hybrid social space in which citizens negotiate issues of identity, domination and power. Theorists of post capitalism argue that the creation of a post-capitalist world does not require taking over the state and creating a utopian society, but rather third spaces prefigure a post-capitalist world and they exist all around us if we know where to look. The actually existing sites of learning we describe have been created largely by social, community and artistic activists to prefigure a solidarity economy and a multi-racial, participatory democracy that is in the process of emerging. They are spaces of formal and informal learning that engage in counter-hegemonic and multisensory forms of learning beyond the cognitive.

Methodologically, we used a mix of long term and short-term observation and documentation with sites, and added over 40 interviews and two World Cafe meetings in New York City and Buenos Aires (Brown, 2005). All interviews and World Cafe sessions were transcribed and analyzed using Saldaña’s (2016) method for analytic coding.

While some of these spaces may look more conventionally like “schools,” many are not often thought of as “education spaces,” they are nonetheless sites for deep learning and reimagining. For instance, worker cooperatives, street art collectives and youth movements are all spaces in which new forms of social relations and learning take place and new identities are negotiated. We found that a central tension for educational third spaces was seeking autonomy and negotiating their relationship to the State, feeling that there are serious tradeoffs between working within the State or outside it.

What is significant about both cities is that education activists have pressured district or state bureaucracies to officially recognize these spaces and open up alternative bureaucratic spaces as a response to a critical mass of schools that represent serious alternatives to current State schooling. While these spaces come with serious limitations and contradictions, they represent a significant advancement over the previous periods in which radical alternatives to State education lacked funding, formal networks and coordination, and were therefore often short-lived.

We identified several characteristics of third spaces of learning. They:
• create conditions in which individual and collective identities are negotiated and where solidarity is built across differences.
• seek to democratize social relations and institutions.
• are not the result of top-down reform efforts, but emerge from political activism, community organizing, and/or social movements.
• embody multi-sensory forms of learning that involve cognition, emotions, desires, memory, artistic expression, ritual, and social solidarity
• Seek to foster critical consciousness through a pedagogy of dialogue and co-learning.
• seek to recover and make visible Indigenous and other subjugated knowledges.
• move beyond critique and resistance to foster a radical imagination that prefigures a new social imaginary.
• are always evolving and filled with imperfections, contradictions, and tensions.

Authors

• Gary L. Anderson, New York University

• Carol Anne M. Spreen, New York University